The Telegraph & Argus highlights one of today's events at the AGM and Summer Festival of the Brontë Society: The Great Charlotte Brontë Debate.

Stage, screen and radio star Maxine Peake will visit Haworth on Saturday to perform readings of Charlotte Brontë’s novels Jane Eyre and Villette.
The actress will read at The Great Charlotte Brontë Debate, a highlight of this year’s Brontë Society summer festival weekend.
A panel of writers, including biographer Claire Harman and novelist Joanne Harris, will form two teams each championing one of Charlotte’s best-known novels.
The discussion will be chaired by Brontë Parsonage Museum Creative Partner 2016, novelist Tracy Chevalier and accompanied by selected readings from both books, which will be read by Maxine.
Arts officer Jenna Holmes said: “2016 is a very exciting year for the museum, and this event is one of the highlights of Charlotte Brontë’s bicentenary programme.
“We have a passionate panel of writers to champion ‘Team Jane’ or ‘Team Lucy’ led by our Creative Partner Tracy Chevalier, and a performance by Maxine Peake will make it a very special evening indeed. We’re absolutely delighted that she is able to join us.” (David Knights)

The National Theatre has announced details of its upcoming tour of Sally Cookson’s energetic and imaginative new adaptation of Charlotte Brontë’s masterpiece Jane Eyre.
The highly acclaimed co-production between the National Theatre and Bristol Old Vic opens at The Lowry in Salford on 8 April and will continue its journey around the country to Aylesbury, Plymouth, Southampton, Edinburgh, Woking, Glasgow, Canterbury, Cardiff, Milton Keynes, Leeds, Aberdeen and Birmingham. Further cities and venues to be announced.
This is a very significant time to be announcing the tour, as 2016 marks the 200th anniversary of Charlotte Brontë’s birth and 2017 is the 170th anniversary of when Jane Eyre was first published.

It is a truth, universally acknowledged, that there are two types of people when it comes to love. The first belong to the school of Brontë, named for the 19th-century English sisters whose dark, romantic novels (Exhibit A: “Wuthering Heights”) send the message to women to seek their soul mates in psychos like Heathcliff.
At the opposite end stands Jane Austen. (...)
Mr. Stillman is speaking during a visit to New York City over a plate of ham and eggs at the Plaza Hotel. While sipping his coffee, he likens the Brontë-Austen clash to “an early 19th century gang war between the Jets and the Sharks.” Charlotte Brontë, he notes, “was one of Jane Austen’s fiercest critics.”
In sharp contrast to the works of the Brontë sisters, Austen’s fiction champions the head over the heart. It follows that her heroines are perceptive, intelligent and, as we would say today, low-maintenance. (William McGurn)

Of all the themes that we recognise as belonging to the Gothic tradition, secrecy is perhaps the most enduring and indispensable. Ever since Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho, the ur-text of the genre, crumbling manors have harboured their locked rooms. Whether they held a captive (as in Jane Eyre), an appalling secret (as in The Bloody Chamber) or nothing at all (as in Northanger Abbey), what was inside them was of secondary importance. What mattered, as any resolute heroine would tell you, was getting hold of the keys. (Paraic O'Donnell)

BBC asks several writers at the Hay Festival about their favourite books:

Maxine PeakeMy favourite book of all time is Wuthering Heights. Not particularly original but it was the first book I read that really turned me on to literature, and I just loved the romance and the mysticism and the spookiness of it. And I just think how evocative it was of the Yorkshire landscape.

Bernadette, whose agoraphobia keeps her inside their apartment, has awakened Heidi’s interest in literature, and some of their favorites are 19th century novels like Jane Eyre. But the novel that So B. It most closely resembles is Oliver Twist, the tale of a lost orphan boy gradually uncovering the truth of his privileged family background. (Stephen Farber)

Stowe was a fervent Christian with a strong interest in spiritualism, whereas [Georges] Eliot had turned her back on organised religion. When the American author claimed to have been visited by the ghost of Charlotte Brontë—a forebear whom both authors deeply admired—Eliot made her skepticism clear: ‘Whether rightly or not’, she told her friend, the episode struck her as ‘enormously improbable‘. (Emma Claire Sweeney)